May 29—GRAND FORKS — Ever since I started writing “Back Then” a couple of years ago, there’s been a particular modus operandi for how I write profiles of interesting people from the past.

My usual process involves meticulously sifting through a trove of yellowed newspaper clippings to uncover the most compelling stories and captivating photos to include with sources from today.

But this week was a little different. I set out to do a story on a famous boxer from Grand Forks — a fascinating, colorful character named Jack Mayfield. He first came to North Dakota in 1912 as part of a minstrel show. He later became a boxer and worked as a masseur for the Grand Forks Elks Club and as an athletic trainer for the University of North Dakota. He would go on to live a full life and, when he died at the age of 106 on June 6, 1986, was believed to be the state’s oldest resident at the time.

In 1984, Forum writer Kevin Murphy conducted one of the last interviews with Mayfield. In it, Mayfield discussed his colorful past, from the horrific tragedy of losing his wife and children on the same day to his triumphs of traveling with heavyweight champ Jack Johnson.

I found this interview so compelling that I’m republishing it with only minor edits and additional comments noted in italics. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

— Tracy Briggs

Interview by Kevin Murphy (originally published in The Forum, Sept. 16, 1984, titled “At round 105: Mayfield”)

If you think the storied past of a 104-year-old man has to be more noteworthy than his present life, you haven’t met Jack Mayfield.

Just three weeks from his 105th birthday, Mayfield remains self-employed as a part-time masseur in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and an occasional cook at stag events.

He would prefer to work full-time.

“I can’t get no job,” Mayfield said, as if puzzled by it.”They won’t hire me because of my age.”

Mayfield considers himself in pretty good shape, save for a sore hip and some hearing loss.

Good enough shape to walk 14 blocks three days a week and to have traveled alone to Minneapolis and back two weeks ago on a Greyhound bus.

“I didn’t need nobody to go with me,” Mayfield said. “I’m not that crippled.”

He can prove it. A former professional boxer, Mayfield likes to strike a fighting pose and demonstrate a few punches. A former softshoe dancer, it wasn’t too long ago that he was still performing. And if aging skin is a sign of a person’s age, no one told Jack Mayfield.

“I haven’t commenced having wrinkles yet,” Mayfield said, a smile easing across his face. “I will when I get older.”

It wasn’t until shortly after his 104th birthday that Mayfield spent time in a hospital. He was in for four days last October. Three years ago, he checked out of a nursing home to get a place of his own, a small apartment downtown.

“They raised the rent, so I walked out,” Mayfield recalled. ” I had to get out and go to work.”

Mayfield’s work dates back to the 1890s when he picked cotton under the hot Louisiana sun. He calls it the toughest work of his life.

When Mayfield was born on October 6, 1879, in Algiers, Louisiana, Thomas Edison had just invented the light bulb, and Jesse James was still pilfering his way across the countryside. The first presidential election in which Mayfield voted was in 1900, when William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryant.

Mayfield gave rubdowns to members of John J. McGraw’s New York Giants baseball team during spring training in Hot Springs Arkansas in 1902, four years before the first World Series. Mayfield’s face lights up when he talks about working as a cook and concessionaire at the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis.

“That was the big one, you know, where they sang, ‘Meet me at the fair. Meet me at the fair,'” Mayfield said, breaking into quiet song.

The man is full of stories.

He used to travel and shoot crap with turn-of-the-century boxer Jack Johnson and was on the training team of champ Jack Dempsey. Old films of Dempsey’s so-called “long-count” fight with Gene Tunney in Chicago in 1927 show Mayfield handling Dempsey’s stool between rounds.

Mayfield knew Al Jolson and was in the same vaudeville show as Duke Ellington. The second of 15 children, Mayfield left the cotton fields as a young man to join the traveling show “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as a kitchen worker.

Soon, he was whistling the tunes while he worked and teaching himself to play an eight-string mandolin in his spare time.

He first visited Grand Forks in 1912 as a minstrel in the old Metropolitan Theater, but personal tragedy would bring him back.

In 1918, while living in Chicago, his wife and two children died on the same day of the flu. The pain of that day remains, Mayfield said, sadly.

“That’s when I left Chicago,” Mayfield said. “I hate to think about it.”

Mayfield remarried years later and had a daughter.

In 1922, Mayfield returned to Grand Forks as a boxer who took on “any and all comers” in a traveling circus.

Mayfield made Grand Forks his home in 1930. He was a masseur at the Grand Forks Elks Club until 1969 when he reluctantly retired at age 90.

“I was the only Negro here for the first 15 years,” Mayfield recalls. “Everybody treated me all right.”

(However, that might not have been the case. Former Forum photographer Colburn Hvidston, who met Mayfield as a kid growing up in Grand Forks and later shot photos of him, recently said, “A few years ago, I was very upset when I learned Jack was only allowed in the basement area of the Elks. The upper levels were off-limits. —Tracy Briggs)

What’s been the most significant change Mayfield has seen over the century?

“The fast cars and motorcycles. Woo-eee! They go!” Mayfield said. “And I never thought of playing night baseball. Imagine doing that!”

The only airplane Mayfield ever flew in was in 1933.

“That was enough!” he said. “It was pretty shaky coming down. I was shaking for a week.”

Mayfield is still interested in current events and is a devoted sports fan, especially boxing and baseball.

“I don’t go to bed until after I see the news and if there’s a ball game on the coast, I stay up until it’s over,” Mayfield said.

He’s up at 6 a.m. every day. He does his own grocery shopping and makes his own breakfast and supper. His biggest meal is lunch, which he takes at the nearby senior citizens center.

Mayfield credits his diet for his longevity.

“I eat plain. I don’t crave things, he said. “I never drink. Oh, I take a little brandy sometimes on account of a cold.”

But yes, Mayfield smokes.

“I like to have a Dutch Master cigar after I’ve eaten,” he said.

He continues to schedule appointments for massages at his apartment, charging five to $10 each.

“It’s been an awful slow summer,” a disappointed Mayfield said.

But he said business always picks up in the harvest season.

“Handling those potatoes and beets, that’s hard work,” he said.

Mayfield displays an almost physician-like knowledge of the aches and pains he treats on the rub-down table. He wants to continue as a masseur “for as long as I can stay on my feet.”

Mayfield said he is grateful for his long life and is contented at 104 (almost 105).

“I’m getting along alright. I’m happy,” Mayfield said. “The good Lord’s with me and provides.”

Less than two years later, on June 6, 1986, Mayfield died in the Twin Cities while visiting his daughter, Arlene Underwood. She told The Forum at the time that she knew it would be his last trip.

“His age was getting to him,” she said. “He was going to leave his mandolin here. Just little things like that kind of indicated that he knew.”

One of his good friends, the late Richard Quesnell of Grand Forks, described Mayfield as “quite a boxer” and showed compassion to everyone.

“Jack lived a good life, so you can’t feel too sorry,” Quesnell said. “He did what he wanted and had lots of friends.”

— Tracy Briggs